


Panic Twice (Shame on Me)

by veausy



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Freeform, One Shot, Sexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-30 17:46:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17833220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veausy/pseuds/veausy
Summary: “Is it still called gay panic if you’re panicking about being straight?”“Dustin, did I ever laugh at your jokes when we first met?” El asks evenly, hand busy rolling her straw wrapper up into a tight coil.He squints, shifts in his seat a little. “Not even one time.”“Well, you’re even less funny now.”





	Panic Twice (Shame on Me)

El has four tattoos, three Coachellas, and one campus parking ticket under her belt when she meets Mike Wheeler.

Max isn’t even supposed to come out that night, but she’s ridiculously affectionate and mothering every time El goes through a breakup, so they stand together in line for the club closest to El’s apartment, staring at Max’s Instagram feed and pretending their feet don’t already hurt from their five-inch heels.

May is pretty warm in Indiana, but it is muggy and oppressive in Miami, and as she feels a droplet of sweat cascade down the side of her neck, El questions whatever addled decision-making faculties had possessed her to choose a college in Florida. She’s not even going home once the semester ends, since she’s T.A.ing for her favorite professor during his summer course. This heat will be her constant companion.

There’s a stubby little palm tree situated at the end of the street, just a few feet away from where the line of partyers curls into the building, and her eyes catch on the silhouette of two tall guys listing against it. They’re both in shadow, nearly invisible from where she stands under the full force of fluorescent bulbs hanging from the plastic awning, so she isn’t sure what even grasped her attention. As her eyes focus on them, she realizes that one is being pressed into the trunk by the other, their lips connected passionately, hands roving over torsos. She thinks she even hears a faint moan, but the crowd in line behind her masks most of the sounds of the street. After another moment of her watching, one of the guys pulls his lips away and presses the back of his head to the tree, lips parted and eyes closed.

With a small grin, she snaps her eyes away to glare at the bouncer several bodies away from her, jamming a flashlight into someone’s eyes as he compares the face to the I.D. photo.

Max finally flicks off her phone, sticking it into her bra, and El sizes her up absently. Max doesn’t like colors the way El does, instead always decked out in shades of gray or just plain black, but she makes it sexy somehow – like tonight, when she’s donning a leather mini skirt and a loose gray sweater, golden-red hair billowing in the soft breeze. El, by contrast, is in her favorite fuzzy pink dress and jean jacket, looking all of twelve years old. “For a straight girl, you’re a better lesbian than I am,” El mutters, rolling her eyes and turning to face the street again.

A hand smacks gently into her hip. “Stop saying stupid things,” Max grouses, barely paying attention. Her eyes are riveted to the door, where a very tall guy with frizzy hair and a bomber jacket is laughing at something the bouncer is saying. El tilts her head, then glances at the stubby palm tree, finding it abandoned. She’s sure that guy was just there, being willingly shoved into the scratchy bark.

When she finally hands her license to Flashlight Dude, the tall guy meets her eyes and smiles politely, looking way too young to be at a club at all. She smiles back tightly with her hand held out, and snatches her I.D. back quickly before running through the doors after Max’s retreating form.

El and her friends are only really patrons of this club because of its cool interior décor. Neither Lucas nor Dustin drinks anything but coffee (well, warm milk, really, anytime after dinner – but that’s none of El’s business), and Max is too obsessed with Lucas’s pecs and biceps to want to spend much time outside of their bedroom anyway.

But this place has a huge water tank in the middle of the dance floor with exotic species of fish, a big pool next to an even bigger screen on the roof that plays old movies until closing time, and some of the drinks are made with dry ice, so El usually orders them when she’s moderately tipsy to watch with crossing eyes as the fumes come out of her glass.

She beelines for the bar as soon as she sees Max snag a small booth for them, ordering their customary Long Island Iced Tea and Appletini, and after a minute of watching the bartender work at the other end of the bar, she feels a presence next to her shoulder.

She glances up – and up – to find the kind face of the tall guy from the door, one hand in the pocket of his jeans as he leans next to her. He seems surprised to meet her eyes, having been surveying the club leisurely, but he grins at her all the same.

“Did you cut in line?” El asks him, plainly.

His eyes widen. “Huh?”

“There was a line of at least fifty people behind me when I walked in, and don’t think I didn’t see you just show up next to the door after your little hookup up against that ugly tree.” Her Appletini is placed in front of her, and she sips from the straw, still staring up at him in challenge.

He pushes some of his messy mane away from his forehead and laughs awkwardly. “I was actually in here earlier, but – I needed to step out, so Harvey let me. And now I’m back.” He extends a hand toward her, showcasing a small Mickey Mouse stamp on his wrist. “See? They marked me.”

El blinks at him slowly. “Harvey?”

“Yeah, the – the bouncer? His name is Harvey.”

“Are you friends with him?”

He’s started to look uncomfortable, shoulders pulling inward and back hunching a bit, and she smiles inwardly. She’s multiple heads shorter than him, but she’s been told her resting social state is scary. “No, I - ? I just asked for his name?”

She nods, eyes still trained on his, all no-nonsense, but she cracks when Max’s drink arrives, smiling up at him a little. He instantly grins back. It’s adorable. Wiping the condensation from her glass on her dress, she extends a hand to him. “I’m El.”

“That’s pretty,” he smiles, squeezing her skin gently and shaking once. “Is it short for anything?”

“Technically, legally, it’s just four letters pronounced as one, but my dad’s kind of an asshole and told me from birth that my real name is Eleven, so I always spelled it E-L, and it’s stuck.”

The boy’s grin brightens, perfect white teeth beaming at her. “He seems like a cool guy.”

“He’s a police chief back home, and he raised me on his own, so – yeah, I think he is.”

With another sweet smile, he says, “I’m Mike.”

El slurps at her Appletini a little, on purpose, because the way people react to such an annoying habit helps her to weed out potential frenemies. Mike barely reacts at all, just glancing down at her straw and back up at her eyes, smile unwavering. “Is that short for anything?” she asks, just to be like that.

He guffaws and slaps a hand on the bar a little. “That’s fair.” He waves to the bartender vaguely, ordering another one of whatever he’d had before, and El looks at the two glasses she’s holding, wonders if that’s her cue to leave.

“You’re gay, right?”

Mike blinks at her. “You said you saw me hooking up outside. And this is a gay club. Are you not - ? Wait, is this a trick qu - ?”

El points to Max, who’s typing happily into her phone as she stretches all over the booth in the corner, feet piled on the opposite seat cushion and spread wide. “That’s my best friend, and she’s not. She just comes here with me when I ask nicely.”

Mike nods. “Pity. There’s, like, three different girls staring at her.”

El shakes her head, sipping daintily now that Mike’s passed her test. “I know, I’ve told her. She doesn’t even wingwoman for me, though. It’s atrocious.”

Mike perks up. “I’ll wingman for you, if you like. I’m great with gay girls.”

El quirks a disbelieving eyebrow at him.

“With all but one,” he corrects, cheeky.

\--

Her hair is pulled into a bun so tight that it’s giving her a headache and her glasses are sliding down her nose for the nine-hundredth time when El finally slams her highlighter down on the desk and exhales loudly.

With one hand loosening the hair tie that’s stretching her scalp to unbearable degrees and the other lifting her phone, El lets her eyes graze over the occupants of the hushed school library. Today, like most Monday afternoons, there’s only a handful of freshmen at the computers and one at a desk several feet away from her, but, given that it’s the last week of finals, the sight is particularly depressing. Almost all the student body has vacated the premises, off to their internships or just fun on the farm at their parents’ houses, but El still has to submit two papers and take a multiple-choice test the following day. To make matters worse, the café downstairs is closed.

With another sigh, she scrolls through her text messages, finds one recent one from Max saying she’s on her way over with coffees, and smiles slightly. Best friends are so important.

It’s as she’s rereading for the fourth time the same passage about the ionization of carbon particles that a chair slides out beside her, and then diagonally from her, making her glance up disorientedly. Max sets a huge Starbucks cup next to El’s textbook before digging through her bag for her books, acting like nothing is amiss. Meanwhile, El is staring at Mike, who’s sitting on the other side of the table with a sheepish smile and his hand in a half-wave.

“Hi, El.”

Max freezes. “You two know each other?”

Mike scratches his nose, looks at El. When she just stares at him, he says, “A little.”

Max shrugs. “Okay, cool.” With her notebook opened to a blank page and a pen hovering over it, she turns to the boy fully and launches into whispered chatter. “So I’m thinking we break the whole term up into quartiles. She’s probably going to want us to cover the general concepts up front, with room in between all the assessments to meet with students and go over quizzes and assignments.”

With bewilderment, El watches how raptly Mike is listening as he nods along and suggests things when Max pauses. He’s like a puppy, eager to please and easy on the uptake, smiling at everything like he’s deriving joy from the conversation. El studies his freckles with suspicion. Some minutes later, when they’re both scribbling notes down, she asks, “What are you two talking about?”

“We’re Holland’s two T.A.s for the summer, and she told us to plan out the syllabus.” With a quick glance at El, Max smirks, “Focus, El, your first paper is due at five.”

Rolling her eyes, El sticks her headphones in her ears and goes back to rereading that same stupid passage for the fifth time.

She’s spent several hours pounding out a three-page paper and bobbing her head along to Dustin’s _Study, but Make It Fashion_ playlist when she glances up to find Max and her things gone. She pops out one earbud and squints at Mike, who’s reading something intently. His hair is less messy than it was the night they’d met, falling in a soft wave over his face, and he’s biting a knuckle in concentration, hunched small over the tabletop.

The screen of her phone blinks with a text from Max saying she’d had to leave for office hours and hadn’t wanted to distract El, so she rubs her eyes and rotates her neck as she sends her completed essay along to her professor.

Suddenly, Mike takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, rubbing the bridge of his nose tiredly. He tips his head back, Adam’s apple protruding sharply, and then stretches so wide that the hem of his shirt rides up over his navel. He’s skinny but sinewy, so his narrow waist is lightly muscled and just as cutely freckled as his face, skin smooth as marble. She blinks.

“You okay?” she asks, when he looks like he’s content to just stay flopped over the back of his chair with his arms spread out lazily.

He straightens, turning his huge brown eyes on her, and blushes. “Sorry. Feels good to stretch.”

El blinks again. “Happy for you.”

He puts his things away soon after, looking apologetic when he stands and leaves her alone at the table once more, but she tries to smile at him as genuinely as she can, which seems to make him happy, and then he ambles away on long legs with as much elegance as a baby deer. Detachedly, she wonders at what age he might finally grow into his absurd height.

\--

“Come _on_ , didn’t you enjoy yourself? You haven’t gone out to the city with us since you were dating Camilla. And the bar scene was better here, you at least had all your drinks paid for by horny guys who couldn’t decode the hate in your eyes.”

The streets are quiet and dark around them, but for the occasional storefront or entrance to a club where handfuls congregate to smoke under eerie tinted lights. El’s shoes click on the ground rhythmically, and she digs her chin further into the neck of her fluffy sweater and groans. “Fine, but quit bringing up my ex-girlfriends to try to trigger me. I know what you’re doing.”

Lucas huffs while Max giggles, and without looking up from the pavement they’re tracking over, El can picture them all wrapped around each other on the other end of the sidewalk like they didn’t just have loud sex in the apartment two hours ago, before they dragged El out to the bar.

She’s had little energy the past few weeks to dedicate to social obligations. Breakups are hard, because she invests so much of her vulnerability in her partners that never sees the light of day otherwise. Girls are all so similar, in how easily they crack her open, and yet so different, in how they still manage to drop the pieces.

The first person she ever had a crush on was her biology lab partner in high school, a soft and friendly girl named Emily with big eyes and tiny hands. El hadn’t even known she was gay when it started, but Emily was the kind of person who wormed her way into people’s hearts in secret. They fell into each other after many rounds of after-school project work and an undeniable physical chemistry, until two years later Emily moved away. Then came Mary, and Violet, and Camilla, and even all these years of dating later, El still can’t figure out what draws her to any person in particular. All her exes were different races, heights, sizes, and ages, but each new relationship took her breath away in equal power to the previous.

So soon after ending things with Camilla, though, every new face El sees seems to drag through her heart with thorns. She’s tired of being alone. Max’s giggles to her left as Lucas sticks his hand under the hem of her shirt only makes El grimace.

They turn the corner when they reach the bus station, and as they walk they approach a frat house. It’s a familiar spot, often the place where El and her friends tend to congregate for end-of-the-year festivities, and El feels content walking through probably the safest block in the neighborhood, with how many campus officers are stationed along it. Thudding music beats through the walls, the red-tinted lamps near the doors making El feel like she’s dreaming. There are multitudes of crowds spread out on the front yard, and two figures listing against a column separate from the rest. She blinks when she recognizes one of them.

“Is that Will?” Lucas murmurs, to which Max hums in the affirmative.

El stares at the couple even harder, making out the smaller shape of her classmate Will Byers while his hips are being gripped tight by the unmistakable, slender hands of Mike Wheeler. They’re kissing deeply, Will’s fingers buried deep in Mike’s silky hair, and the bleakness of the one-o’clock Thursday night in the city casts them in a light that is a bit surreal, a bit illicit.

As they get closer, El studies the veins of Mike’s forearms, the way he’s so tall that he’s almost wrapped around the other, one palm cradled around Will’s crown, and something buzzes through her skin. She shivers, drawing her eyes down to her feet as she passes them by, and frowns for the rest of the trek back to campus.

\--

One early morning two weeks into the summer term, El drops the weights she’s been lifting near the back of her gym and rubs at a drop of sweat sliding down her neck. She’s been at it since six, staring herself down in the wall-length mirrors and getting squats in between each rep.

As she turns to grab her water bottle off the bench, her eyes catch on Mike, whose feet are thudding on the treadmill evenly. He’s clad in loose attire, eyes rapt on the textbook he’s brought with him, flipping through the pages at a steady pace.

The gym has only them and an elderly woman on a stationary bike, every sound reverberating through the space as if it were empty. El sips from her bottle, eyes intent on the smooth movement of Mike’s legs as he runs, and when he grips the edge of his shirt to wipe at his forehead, she stares at the smooth expanse of his tight abdomen, muscles shifting under skin with every footstep. She’s so busy ogling him that she doesn’t notice her bottle dropping from her grasp, the slam of it on the tile floors echoing loudly.

She ducks to get it, surprised to catch Mike’s eyes in the mirror when she straightens again. He smiles and waves at her innocently, eyebrows raised like he’s asking if she’s okay. She nods with a tight smile back at him, and returns to her weights.

Some time later, she drops from her pull-ups to find Mike approaching her, shiny with sweat and panting. She nods in greeting.

“I didn’t know you came here,” he muses, using the small towel in his hand to dab at his neck. The collar of his shirt is loose over his collarbones, and she notes the glisten there as she watches his movements.

“Yeah, got a membership for the length of the summer session,” she answers, tugging her gloves closer to her wrists and shifting on her feet restlessly. She feels like she has more energy now than she did when she walked in over an hour ago, and it makes her jittery, confused. Mike’s eyes run casually down over her neon purple leggings and pink trainers, and she wants to hide from him, without knowing why. “I wanted to train for the half-marathon that the track team does in the fall, but I’m too scared to run alone around this area.”

Instantly, Mike looks overjoyed. “I always run that thing! I train in the city park by Bellevue, every other afternoon when I’m done with T.A. stuff. You’re welcome to join me.”

“Oh,” El murmurs, watching as he tips his head back and takes a pull from his own reusable water bottle, the stretch of his tendons so foreign, the shape of his Adam’s apple so strange, but so interesting to her.

He glances down, taking her hesitation for rejection, and shrugs. “No pressure, just thought I’d offer. Don’t want you out in the woods alone at night.”

“No, no,” she protests, fiddling with her crop top and stepping closer to him without intending to. Her hand, wrapped around her phone, twitches. “That sounds great. Can you, um, text me when you’re free?”

He takes the phone from her with warm fingers, careful when he hands it back, and El flushes when he flicks the little gem dangling down from her navel ring. “Cute,” is all he says, walking for the exit with a wave in farewell, but her chest expands anyway.

\--

Like that, they fall into a routine of running together around the perimeter of the city park for an hour every other day before dinner. The first week, they barely talk, El fully immersed in the playlists Dustin keeps sharing with her, and Mike thinking intently about something or other, no headphones on.

At their fourth session, a small unleashed dog leaps onto their path and starts chasing them, making them laugh breathlessly as they try to lead it back to the park entrance, and for the rest of that run they chatter about Mike’s dog back home and the cat Hopper adopted when El moved away.

Every run after that is like an outing for coffee between friends, a way for them to share what’s going on in their lives and complain about being T.A.s while falling into easy synchronicity of breathing, pacing, and speech. By July, El recognizes the scent of Mike’s aftershave from a single whiff and knows everything about his family and brings him protein bars for after they’re done, both cooling off as they walk slowly back to campus and chew on the snacks.

She always fist-bumps him when they part under the big arch on the main lawn, hiding her smile every time he snorts at the ridiculousness of it, especially since it started when she tried to avoid his hugs goodbye. Tonight, they amble slowly through the streets and discuss the relative value of using a regular baseball bat as a self-defense weapon over a bat with nails in it, when Mike cuts himself off with a hoarse, “Hey.”

El glances up, spotting the elegant shape of Will Byers leaning against a pillar with his hip, smiling at Mike serenely. He’s one of the most beautiful boys El has ever seen, bright green eyes and soft features utterly inimitable, and she swallows thickly when Mike walks up to him to drop a wet kiss on his lips.

Will holds onto Mike’s bicep, like the kiss made him weak in the knees, and El keeps her distance while they whisper, fussing with the wrapper of her half-eaten protein bar and listening to its crinkle. They’re about two blocks away from the lawn, which is actually in the opposite direction of her apartment building, so El yearns to turn on her heel and strut back home, but she knows Mike would interpret that as her being mad at him. Maybe she is. She doesn’t know herself lately.

Mike’s chuckle interrupts her thoughts, and she looks at the breadth of his shoulders, the way it is so unlike the soft, rounded form of all the girls she’s loved. Mike is all angles on the surface, but the past few weeks have shown her that he’s even softer on the inside than she is, a veritable sweetheart with a heart too big for his body. Some days prior, he’d teared up when they saw a deceased baby bird that had fallen out of its nest, and even though she’d literally never cared for wild animals before and felt absolutely no emotions about nature running its course, El took the tiny body and made it an equally tiny grave near the edge of their trail, sticking a thick branch in the mud to mark its spot. When Mike’s hand grazed hers as they rearranged the dirt over the patch, El had gasped and jerked away, tingling everywhere. She’d shaken her head, acting alarmed and apologetic, but Mike had still given her sidelong glances all the way back.

She clears her throat, drawing Mike’s round eyes to herself, and waves awkwardly. “I think I can take it from here, you guys go ahead,” she mutters, already crossing over the barren street to the other side. “Text me next time you’re free.”

He nods, with a frighteningly perceptive look on his face, and raises one fist in front of himself. She raises hers back, in a poor imitation of a fist bump, snorting. Her strides along the pavement and away from his gaze feel stilted, hollow. She looks back right before she disappears behind the building to find that Mike had evidently made Will stand there with him by the pillar and wait until El was back in the vicinity of some campus officers before they departed. Her chest feels warm, but her fists curl defensively in her pockets.

A crush, that’s what it must be. A crush, so much like the ones she’d had in the years before, when everything Emily said had made her insides flutter, when everything Camilla did had made her eyes glue themselves to her like they couldn’t get their fill. But El is gay. That is a truth she’s known with boundless certainty since the age of sixteen, never questioned, never challenged. Not a single pretty boy has ever entered her life in a way she wanted to make permanent, not a single one has made her breathless with his laughter and speechless with his touch.

Every time she sees Mike's bare skin she wants to mark it up, wants to taste every inch and to count every freckle, to know him.

At the elevator doors up to her apartment, she shakes her head, clearing it of these thoughts, and wonders how long she has until her denial runs out.

\--

Dustin, unlike El, had a sexuality crisis in his youth. Having always thought he was straight, he had to come to terms with being into guys when a very young, very hot substitute teacher took over his homeroom class for two weeks during his senior year of high school. Despite having heard this story fifty times since she met him, El finds it fascinating, because her sexuality had settled over her with minimal intrusion – like a warm blanket, a gentle discovery that never made her bristle. What a pity; she’s sure bristling now.

As they sit in the diner two blocks from Dustin’s dorm, she listens to the chatter of patrons around them and sips at her iced tea slowly, trying not to spiral into anxiety about her crisis.

“Is it still called gay panic if you’re panicking about being straight?”

“Dustin, did I ever laugh at your jokes when we first met?” El asks evenly, hand busy rolling her straw wrapper up into a tight coil.

He squints, shifts in his seat a little. “Not even one time.”

“Well, you’re even less funny now.”

He pouts, hand on his chest like he’s wounded, and then points to her. “What you gotta do is make out with some dudes.”

She squints at him. “Why would that help? I’m not into other dudes.”

“It’d be an experiment,” he protests, gesturing widely as he wiggles excitedly. “Now, I’ve always told you it’s a spectrum and nobody’s ever on the very end, _but_ , if we were to pretend that you could possibly sit on total gayness with absolutely zero interest in men, then you wouldn’t be questioning yourself at all. However, if you think you’re into him, then there’s a chance you might be into others. Hence, our experiment.”

“Don’t call it _ours_ ,” El makes a face, flicking the wrapper at him. “I do not consent to this study.” She glances around the diner at all the men she can find, gagging a little. “Even the thought of it is revolting.”

And, because her life is apparently an exercise in irony, that’s when the door jingles and Mike steps in. El chokes on her tea a little, ducking down and grabbing at her throat as she takes deep breaths, while Dustin swivels in his seat to stare at the cause of her idiocy. “Oh, whoa,” he bellows, utterly self-unaware, “is that him?”

El kicks him in the shin, keeping her eyes down on the table. “Shut the fuck up, oh, my God.”

“Hey!” Dustin shouts suddenly, gesturing to Mike, who’s halted in his path toward a free table. “You! Come here!”

El groans into her hands weakly, curling lower over herself in hopes of turning invisible, but then Mike’s achingly familiar shape is standing at the end of their booth, confused and curious. His eyes crinkle a bit when they land on her, but she keeps her own hidden beneath the veil of her fingers, waiting to see how much worse Dustin can possibly make this whole ordeal. “Hey,” Mike greets.

“You know my queen El, here, right?” Dustin gestures to El, without looking at her.

Mike nods slowly.

“Well, she lost a bet she made with me, and her punishment is kissing any friend or acquaintance that she runs into today. Do you consent to letting her suffer?”

Mike blinks, turning wide eyes on her, and El sinks further into her seat, cheeks heating. “Uh,” he begins, one long finger scratching under his jaw. “Yeah, okay.”

El freezes. Dustin whoops. Then, one of Dustin’s hands lands firmly on her wrist and tugs her up to stand beside Mike, arms wrapped around herself and eyes jumping all around in an effort to avoid his. When she fails to move, Mike asks, “Am I – supposed to - ?”

“Nah, give her a minute,” Dustin yawns, sticking three fries in his mouth as he scrolls through his phone, and El takes a deep breath.

When she finally lets herself look at Mike, she takes in the playful look in his eyes, the glisten of his lower lip like he’s just licked over it, and relaxed way in which he’s tucked his hands in his pockets, patiently waiting. El steps closer, breaths coming short now, eyes riveted to Mike’s plump mouth, the light shadow of stubble coming in around his jaw, and heat pools in her belly.

When their lips finally touch, it’s tentative, dry. El’s standing on the tips of her toes, hands pressed to Mike’s chest for balance, while he’s bent forward a little to accommodate her height. She opens her eyes, finding his shut tight, a small smile coloring his expression, and dips in again, pressing once, twice, before parting her lips around his. He lets his hands drop lightly to her waist, giving as good as he gets, and before she knows it, they’re making out pretty lewdly in the middle of a well-lit diner during suppertime.

She pulls away, pressing her fingers to her mouth, and stares up at him. He looks winded, too, breathing through his mouth as he straightens up, just the obnoxious sound of Dustin’s chewing keeping them company.

“Thanks,” she ventures, eyes dropping shyly, “for letting me – um – “

“No, yeah,” he mumbles, running the palms of his hands down his sides and nodding more times than necessary. His hair flops with each jerk of his head, making her want to run her fingers through it. She steps back, closer to her seat, and sets her hand on the edge of the tabletop.

“Sorry,” she offers.

He shrugs. “It’s okay, I didn’t – I didn’t mind.”

There’s an awkward silence then, both of their gazes running over one another’s swollen lips and the distance El’s put between them, and the walls of the diner which are lined with summer students and locals. They’re all chattering like something horrible hasn’t just happened, like El’s entire world didn’t just get flipped on its head.

“Um,” Mike says, rubbing a hand over his chin, “I have to – I’m meeting someone. So, I’ll - ?”

“See you later,” El returns, dropping into her seat and watching him go.

“Hmm,” Dustin says then, smarmy, still typing something into his phone. “Straight yet?”

El groans, licking her lips, tasting Mike there. “I’m into him. I’m fuckin’ into him.”

“Well, I think with straight people how it works is, he’d be the one who fucks into – “

El kicks Dustin’s knee hard enough to make him howl, then steals all his fries. It doesn’t make her feel better.

\--

One afternoon, El comes to her and Mike’s meeting spot by the campus café, to find him pacing as he chats on the phone, while Will leans on the wall of the building, sipping from a large coffee cup.

“Hey,” she greets the other boy, using the wall to stretch her hamstrings.

“Hi,” Will greets, smile cute and friendly.

“I’m – um – El, we had a class together last fall?”

“I remember,” Will nods. “Christiansen _hated_ you.”

El scoffs. “Homophobic piece of shit.”

“Yeah, he really was. It really made me feel awesome each time you told him to eat shit. Metaphorically.”

El shrugs. “Think globally, act locally.”

Will giggles, all cute and soft the way El isn’t. She hates him, even as she likes everything about him. To think she has a chance with Mike – who’s _gay_ – is ridiculous. She’s nothing like what he’d want.

“Shit, Nance, twins? _Twins_?” Mike exclaims suddenly, making them both glance up at him fondly. When she finally manages to drag her eyes away from his wide grin, the sound of his laughter echoing in her head, she finds Will eyeing her and runs cold.

“You know he’s gay, obviously,” Will says, like he’s establishing the basis of whatever he’s going to say next. “He’s also a bit of a slut.”

El scowls. “Excuse me?”

“I don’t mean it in a derogatory way!” Will rushes to explain. “Hell, we’re all sluts, depending on the time of year. I just think you might not realize that he has a reputation – he doesn’t date.”

El’s eyes roll back to Mike’s lanky shape some feet away, wondering why she’s hearing this.

“So, you know, he’s not the best … um … not the best option?” Will doesn’t meet her eyes when she glances at him. “For people who might be … confused.”

Another wave of cold washes over her, and El straightens from her stretch, dusting off her hands from where they’d been plastered flat to the wall of the cafe. “I see,” she mumbles, rolling her neck and wishing Mike would hang up.

When he finally does, minutes later, Will bids him goodbye with a soft kiss, promising to meet up for dinner, and he even sends a sweet smile to El, which she struggles to return.

Their run that afternoon is quiet and tense, mostly because El gives clipped answers and can’t seem to make her legs move as fast as they should. Mike offers her his Gatorade, which she declines, but she watches the red of it paint his lips, because she can’t not.

She fist bumps him four blocks early, hastening to part ways and spend the night in the throes of her woes on Max’s couch. Mike watches her until she enters the building, offering a tiny wave before going on his way.

\--

As the summer session draws to a close, El’s feelings for Mike only get stronger. She notices everything: the shape of his brows when he looks bewildered, the scent of his clothes right after he’s done laundry, the way his lips curl around her name, the exact shade of brown of his irises. More and more, she comes to believe the only thing that has ever attracted her to people was the way they made her _feel_. Emily, confident and settled within her identity, made El feel comfortable in exploring her own. Mary, Violet, and Camilla had offered her their own versions of haven. Mike - Mike just makes her feel safe. She knows with ineluctable certainty that her heart would be protected in his hands, if she ever gave it to him. If he ever reached out to hold it.

He begins to walk her to the door of her apartment after their runs, diligent and thoughtful once he realizes she has to trek three blocks from the lawn on her own.

Max spots them once, when she’s coming to visit El with some takeout, and she takes furtive photos of them as they shoot the shit and talk about meaningless nothings to put off saying goodbye. They loiter like that for twenty minutes, just standing at the entrance to the building and laughing, laughing endlessly. Mike’s eyes get really small when he chuckles, nose pulling up all crinkly, and when he notices El shivering from the temperature shift of the cold front closing in over their county, he takes the jacket he’d stuffed into his backpack and wraps it around her, denying her protests even though her apartment is only some steps away.

When El finally walks inside ten minutes after that, Max has gone home.

After she comes out of the shower, El finds Max’s photos in her messages as thirteen attachments. They’re all variations of El bent over in double chortling at one of Mike’s dinosaur jokes, or Mike seized up all weird with his head thrown back, blurry but still managing to communicate the happiness El had felt.

_You 2 would be so fucking cute._

El stares at the text, chewing on her lip, and doesn’t reply.

\--

There’s an August graduation ceremony for seniors who only needed the summer courses to finish their degrees, and El is invited to attend along with all the T.A.s who’d been working alongside her these months.

She’s seated in the second to last row, feeling the humidity of the summer air seep into her skin, but she’d worn a simple white sundress loose around her body, and she lifts the hem of it every so often to send a soft breeze over her legs. After the fourth time she does it, someone gently pinches the waist of her dress, pulling the material and releasing it in a similar fashion to send a gust of air over her back.

She turns to find Mike smirking at her, eyebrows raised. “Hot?” he mouths.

El rolls her eyes, turning back to the front of the lawn where the stage was set up, trying to focus on the drone of the Provost as he enters the second hour of his speech. The knowledge that Mike is seated right behind her, watching her, makes her skin heat even more.

When they finally get to stand and move around on the grass, El sits on the edge of the fountain by the admissions center, gazing into the water as the sun sets overhead. Mike joins her soon after, one ankle piled on the knee of the other leg as he follows her gaze and studies the coins that litter the bottom of the little pool.

“That’ll be us in May,” he murmurs, when a gaggle of graduates walks by talking loudly about getting blacked out somewhere trashy tonight.

El snorts. “I hope not.”

“That, but … nicer,” he modifies, and she feels his eyes on her even as she refuses to look up from the trickling water. “Summer flew by, didn’t it?” he asks.

El hums noncommittally. Too fast. Who knows when she’ll spend time with Mike again, now that they’ll both have course schedules that interfere with running in the park, now that all their friends will be back on campus. She’s forlorn, but resigned. She never had a chance to begin with.

“Hey,” he says suddenly, standing and extending a hand toward her. “Come with me.”

Bewildered, El does, letting his warm, dry fingers intertwine with her own, and letting him drag her through campus in an unfamiliar direction. He uses his student I.D. to swipe them into the campus gym. “Track team privileges,” he explains, pulling her through the door into the abandoned building, up two flights of stairs and down winding hallways.

“Where – where are you – ?”

“It’s a surprise,” he calls, running straight ahead toward a wall of glass. They finally enter upon the large indoor pool that El assumes the swim team will be using when classes start up again. The pool is lit, soft blue spreading through the cool room, water utterly still. Everything they do echoes, and Mike urges El to leave her high heels at the door, enthusiastic to come dip their toes in.

They pad over with care, both gazing in awe at the signs marking a depth of sixteen feet on the deep end, both breathing quietly and watching as the little lamps underwater shift and turn, illuminating different areas of the pool on a set timer. Just as El decides to lean down and brush her fingers through the water, two firm hands splay on her back and shove, throwing her with a strangled screech into the cold pool.

She comes up for air seconds later, water sluicing over her face as she gasps, and Mike is bent over laughing at the edge, face in his hands. Intent, she swims over as quietly as she can and wraps a firm hand around his ankle, tugging until he’s tipping over and crashing into the water right next to her.

El’s white dress is nearly translucent with how it’s clinging to her body under water with blue lights shining on it, but she paddles lightly and sneers at Mike when he pulls up out of the water to catch his breath.

“How did I not see that coming,” he wheezes, pushing his hair off his forehead, and it stands up in the air like a lazy mohawk, putting his beautiful marble skin on display. El pads closer, aware of the over ten feet between her and the bottom of the pool, comforted by the lights that let her see it.

“Karma’s a bitch,” she retorts, splashing him lightly. They have a splashing fight then, their laughter echoing against the tile walls, and finally they end up in the shallow end, seated on the steps and gazing at the opposite wall of windows, where the night sky is visible. Their conversation peters off eventually, just the soft sound of water ensconcing their bodies every time they shift. When El looks away from the stars twinkling in the distance, she finds Mike watching her, eyes dark. She stares back.

It seems there’s nothing either of them does to move closer, but somehow they end up with mere inches between them, El finally noticing the way Mike had unbuttoned his dress shirt to put his sharp collarbones and thick neck on display, and she swallows as her eyes catch on his smooth skin, feeling like she’s filling up with air.

Mike’s breath caresses her lips, close enough to connect their mouths but letting her make the call, and for a few seconds, they just sit like that, eyes roving over one another’s faces and breathing shallowly. Then, El tips forward.

Mike’s hands land on her hips instantly, gripping tight enough to bruise, but not enough to make her complain. She buries her own fingers in his hair, pulling him out into the deeper end with her so that they’ll both float a little. Like this, with the water holding her up, the foot of difference in their heights in negligible. El wraps her legs around his waist and clings.

When their lips are raw and their lungs are screaming for air, El sets her forehead on his shoulder, folding herself around him. He’s wide and hard and muscled, a combination she’s never experienced before, his chest flat and his face scratchy. She pulls back to rub her finger over his stubble and gaze at the alien five-o’clock shadow curiously.

“I think I’m bi,” she whispers, quiet like she wants to hide it from the rest of the empty room. Mike’s eyes widen like he’s surprised by her bluntness, but his lips quirk in a smile anyway.

“I'm glad,” he answers.

“What about you?” El asks, pinching his thick lower lip between her fingers and tugging on it for no particular reason, making him laugh.

“I think I'm bi, too,” he whispers, eyes dropping to her chin, her neck, her chest. She glances down to find that her dress has, in fact, turned pretty much transparent, and between her panic at the indecency and not knowing what she could possibly do about it, Mike pulls her close, pressed tight until their bodies align.

“I panicked more about being straight than I did about being gay,” she divulges, touching his Adam’s apple lightly.

He looks amused. “Worried you wouldn’t be accepted?”

“Shut up,” she argues through laughter. “It was dumb. I just hate not knowing myself.”

Mike kisses her again, distracting her for a few more minutes. “Go on a date with me?” he asks when he pulls away, using his feet to paddle them back to the steps at the shallow end.

“What?” El’s eyes grow wide, arms wound too tightly around his neck to pull away. The shift of his muscles all along where they touch is too tantalizing to separate from, anyway. 

At the sight of her open shock, Mike stutters, “A date? With – me? Did you not – I thought – “

El’s smile is so wide that it’s painful. “I heard you didn’t date.”

Mike pushes her from him, laughing when she splashes back. Rolling his eyes, he deadpans, “Sure, and I bet you heard I was gay, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Edit: I've been shown some pretty unsettling social media commentary about this story by people who claim to have read it, yet clearly lack all understanding of the message. I realize that an overwhelming lot of readers in this fandom is young, for which I give concessions, but it certainly left an unpleasant taste in my mouth to see what was said, both about my intentions and my handling of a plot that very obviously subversively addresses internalized homo-/biphobia, conceptions of sexuality, and societal norms. 
> 
> I can't ever control the way my work will be received, but I always have only the best intentions and would never seek to force a narrative that is exclusionary or narrow-minded, so to have self-proclaimed writers assign such a horribly misplaced tone to what I'm doing is upsetting, disappointing. If you guys ever feel like I'm disrespecting you somehow with what I write, I apologize. There are no artists or writers in any fandom who lovingly craft stories that mean something to them in an effort to alienate readers. That's the opposite of what fandom means to me, and to every writer that I know. If you ever find yourselves put off by someone's content, I only wish you would have the basic respect for them as creators to speak to them directly.


End file.
